


Distant Gods

by korben600



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars: Rebellion Era - All Media Types
Genre: Death, Fictional Religion & Theology, Religion
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-26
Updated: 2020-04-26
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:01:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23861224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/korben600/pseuds/korben600
Summary: In a galaxy far far away, some names will eventually spread. The names of politicians, leaders, and speakers travel across the stars from mouth to mouth, bringing tales of good works, and great deeds, becoming heroes in the eyes of millions.But some names burn through the galaxy. Their works and deeds inflaming people until the galaxy itself is shaped by their actions.Some people of skin and bone turn from mere tales into something...more. Mythical figures beyond anything they had ever hoped, or wanted to achieve.And there was no family that had ever burned through the stars quite like the Skywalkers.This is the story of how they became gods.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 53





	Distant Gods

In every society, there is a word, or a concept describing the ability for a great leader to inspire greater things of their people than any could reasonably think possible. In some cultures their word for this ethereal ability roughly translates to “charisma”. In others, it would be more akin to “strength of character”. 

However, in a galaxy far, far, away, they simply call this, The Force. 

* * *

The Jedi were always careful with their abilities, and their stature in the Republic. Always remaining in their ivory towers on Coruscant, abstaining from but the bare minimum of politics, not out of fear of the common people, though that did play a role, but out of fear of  _ themselves _ . 

Jedi were exceptional orators, debaters, and leaders, but while some of their charisma was certainly the result of being trained from childhood to become peacekeepers, there was always something... _ more _ ...to it. Using the Force in public inspired emotions in others, though whether this was social or scientific was never determined, even after a thousand years of on-and-off study. 

And the Jedi feared this power of theirs. Feared that spending too much time mesmerizing the public would horribly backfire, and they would be stripped of their power, or worse, given too much. 

Then, the Clone Wars began. 

And the Jedi changed. 

Now, most Jedi were no longer the orators they’d once been, they were warriors, and generals, surrounded by throngs of people, and using the Force violently on a near daily basis. Soon, the Jedi had accidentally cultivated cults of personality within their clone armies, to the point that some in the Senate worried that the clones would no longer listen to the Republic, but instead their generals. 

Then came Order 66.

People in power breathed a sigh of relief that the Jedi wouldn’t become the powerful political figures they had been near guaranteed to be after the war, before those same people in power shuddered in fear at the new political establishment that had been built on the Order’s corpse.

It was a new age, without Jedi. But the force wasn’t  _ quite  _ done with the galaxy yet.

With the fall of the Jedi Order, came the rise of new figures in the galaxy. 

Without the Jedi Order holding them back from the galaxy, these new figures dove headfirst into the galaxy’s conflicts, blazing brighter than the Order ever had in its thousand years of existence. 

These people would have probably been great leaders without the Force… but with it, they became  _ legends.  _

This is not their story. 

* * *

On every planet, there is a point of peace. Some place where one can quietly kneel, and meditate quietly, collecting their thoughts

“WE’RE KRIFFING OVERRUN, FALL BACK TO THE SECOND PERIMETER!!!!!” 

This is not one of those points. 

This is Mustafar, and the poor soul screaming was an Imperial stormtrooper, calling out a warning right after he’d watched another of his friends be devoured by what he and his comrades had previously dubbed a “lava flea”.

The Empire had begun building something on Mustafar. Something  _ big _ , something that gave the troops a sense of dread every time they looked at it. But most of the troops stationed to protect this building didn’t have time to waste pondering on the specifics of what the building did. 

That was the bean counters job.  _ Their  _ job was to protect the building from the near continuous onslaught of lava fleas barraging their front doors. 

They were simple beasts, running into their blasterfire with wanton abandon. But they were numerous. 

And earlier that day, the building had done... _ something _ . Glowed, and fired off energies the troops had never seen before, causing a lightning storm that seemed to engulf half the planet. The energy released seemed to dive into their souls and tell them when they’d die, only stopping it’s horrible feeding when the building tore itself apart. 

The troops might have thought to ponder on this for a moment, questioning why the Empire was here, and what strange things the Empire was harvesting from Mustafar, were it not for the local fauna deciding to interrupt them. 

Where once they were numerous, now they were legion, with lava fleas attacking from every direction, pounding on the Imperial defenses until they hit the breaking point. 

That breaking point was signalled by the trooper screaming. The sergeant who gave the impromptu order was designated by the Empire as RV-2016, and by his mother as Pyrrhus Vicree. He was originally from Corellia, and was one of the first batches of stormtroopers that weren’t cultivated from the remnants of the Grand Army of the Republic. Serving here was supposed to be an honor, a nice, quiet mission guarding some Imperial higher up he’d never seen before while the Empire built some secret structure. 

But as he saw his men under him getting torn to pieces by the planet’s local fauna, he cursed his potent miscalculation of his job. 

“Fall back, you kriffing idiots!” He shouted as he hastily blasted a flea off a private’s back, and then dragged the unconscious man back from the magma beaches. His blaster never stopped going as he slowly worked his way back, gunning down more and more of the animals, just as more and more flooded towards him. They climbed over the bodies of their own dead in their fervor to kill the stormtroopers, and as Sergeant Vicree drew back with his fallen comrade, he realized that he was slowly being surrounded by the bugs as his own men fell back behind him. 

Soon, his blaster was the only thing keeping him and his private from being eaten from every direction, and in addition to the bugs still advancing on him, his blaster’s barrel was slowly beginning to glow with the telltale signs that it was overheating, and would soon be useless slag. 

Quietly, the Sergeant prayed. For something, anything, to come save him...or at the very least to kriffing  _ kill  _ these  **_damn bugs_ ** !

Even across the battlefield, and through the sounds of a thousand angry insects the size of speeders, Pyrrhus heard something. A burst of noise, that played like lightning scraping on durasteel, but somehow... _ angry _ . 

As one, the bugs almost froze, to the point where Sergeant Vicree could pause his blasting, and take a second to look at the massive flea- like creatures, eyes tracing the quivering mandibles and gangly appendages of the swarm around him and his private. He was strong enough to admit to himself that he was scared. 

But as the long second continued with the fleas doing nothing, he gazed closer at the creatures, and how their faces, if you could call four eyes and a horn a face, looked different, almost like he could read their expressi-

The moment passed, and the beasts almost screamed at him, before rushing forward. 

This time though, it was different. 

The beasts were more crazed now, more incensed, more reckless, but this time, there was one thing keeping him, and the private he stood above, alive. 

They weren’t attacking him. 

The beasts were surging forward, running towards the beach as a horde, nearly ignoring Vicree and his charge, as ignorant of him as a river is of a rock dropped in it. Furthermore, his blaster had cooled down, so he laid bolts into any fleas stupid enough to try to run him over in their pursuit of whatever had caught their attention. 

But as his blaster began to glow with that telltale orange that signalled his death, he began to hear something. A loud hum, the sound passing through the battlefield like the air itself was being sliced in twain. And with every slice, he heard screaming, the telltale screaming of dying beasts. 

Vicree couldn’t spare a look behind him, the lava fleas were still rushing him, and even a second’s hesitation at his blaster would mean his death, but he didn’t need to. 

He could  _ feel  _ something coming up from behind him. It started with a churning in his stomach, and moved through to the rest of his body, to the point where eventually his heart seemed to almost want to flee from his chest just to be farther away from whatever the hell was approaching him. 

The fleas, for their part, fought harder, and faster, racing towards the thing behind him, but judging by their increasing screams, whatever they were doing, it wasn’t working. 

Finally, when his body was practically screaming for him to run away from whatever was behind him, and take his chances with the bugs, a black blur raced around him. 

Its red blade lanced through the bugs surrounding him in less than a second, and as their wave of bodies surged forward to fill the gap created by the bisected fleas, the blur stopped, and dozens of bugs exploded away from him. 

The blur had stopped moving, revealing what might have been a man, instead. The figure towered over the poor Sergeant and his charge, and didn’t even deign to look at them, the only acknowledgement of their presence being his cape towards them. 

Sergeant Vicree knew of this…”man”. Intellectually, at least. They had received briefings and holos on who they would be serving under. But nothing they’d read or seen had adequately conveyed the magnitude of his presence. 

Somewhere else in his mind, his training kicked in, and he slowly walked up to the dark figure, ignoring the private he had fought so hard to protect. 

“Lord Vader…” He started lamely, looking out at the sea of lava fleas just staring at his commanding officer. “...We should really fall back. We’re outgunned.” 

The figure, for the first time, seemed to notice him, and fixed him with a gaze from two soulless eyes. Behind the dark eyes of every stormtrooper helmet, there was always a man. With Vader’s mask...he wasn’t so sure. 

But if there was anything behind that mask, it was  _ glaring  _ at him now. 

Pyrrhus felt rooted to the spot, like gravity itself was fixing him to that point, like it was pressing so hard onto him that he couldn’t breathe. 

Distantly, the part of the Sergeant’s mind that wasn’t paralyzed in fear realized that the impending feeling of dread he and his comrades had felt emanating from that mysterious building the Empire was constructing wasn’t actually the structure itself. 

It was the figure before him.

“No.”

One word, delivered in a deep tone of power, and  _ force _ . 

The fleas had shaken out of their reverie, and surged forward towards them.

Curiously, Sergeant Vicree wasn’t worried about them. 

He found that the power rooting him to the spot compelled him to watch the beasts rush forward in a frenzied throng. 

Vader lifted one hand, and swiped it over the landscape. 

Starting at the edge of the beach, the lava itself surged forward against the tide of beasts, the unrelenting orange wave of slag annihilating their entire column in seconds, melting them alive. 

Pyrrhus heard a voice beside him. 

“ _ That _ is the meaning of Empire.” 

The voice began to stride away, and a few seconds later, he heard a screaming of the private he had fought so hard to protect. 

The sergeant found himself still rooted to the spot, ignoring the scream behind him. He knew that whatever Vader was doing to his private, he could not stop him. He just continued looking at the melting bodies of the lava fleas. 

He now knew what he had seen in the beasts faces earlier that day, the first time they had stopped at the sound of that red blade. 

Fear. 

For they knew  _ death  _ was coming for them. 

* * *

Sergeant Vicree was slightly shocked when the private Vader had…”dealt” with...had changed. The private, formerly a sedate and quiet man, transformed into someone completely different after that, a verbose and enigmatic artist who constantly wore a dull grey mask all the time, and advised Vader on construction of new fortresses to replace the broken building. 

But Sergeant Vicree wasn’t  _ surprised _ . 

He was transferred to another station after the 4th time the secretive building they were working on was destroyed. 

One day, while he was on Felucia some months later, a commanding officer came up to him with news. 

“Did you hear, Vicree? Mustafar...there was some kind of huge battle...the natives were absolutely slaughtered, but... _ everything _ died.” 

“Everything but Vader.” Vicree spoke with resigned certainty. 

“Yeah, how’d you know?”

“Just a hunch…” The sergeant said quietly. 

* * *

That night, Vicree quietly smuggled some black and red paint from the quartermaster, and carefully painted a black Imperial insignia in a quiet, unknown corner of the barracks. 

But slashing through the Empire’s signature symbol was a red blade. 

And when the paint was dried, and done, Vicree started whispering his prayer. 

His prayer for power, his prayer for death, his prayer for  _ empire _ . 

For he knew that if they met again, Vader might kill him. 

For he was death, and death is unpredictable, and death  _ takes _ what it wants. 

But on Mustafar, death answered  _ his  _ prayer. 

So he prayed for the power to survive, he prayed for death to his enemies, and he prayed for the empire to keep him safe. 

However, his biggest prayer was to thank death for being on  _ his  _ side. 

**Author's Note:**

> Inspiration for this is based on the Darth Vader Comics by Marvel. If you want more context for what story the Sergeant had wandered into, go ahead and check it out!


End file.
